Internet's playing their 'toons/Comics fill cyberspace with giggles

By Dwight Silverman |
June 12, 2006

The Internet, a hot spot for innovative publishing, is becoming a popular place for an old print standby - cartoons.

Or, as they're known in the lexicon of cyberspace, net.toons, pronounced "net-dot-toons."

From the satirical NetBoy - described as the Internet's "idiot savant" by his creator - to the absurdity of Doctor Fun, a Far Side clone, the 'Net gives cartoonists an instant and sizable audience.

"When I first put NetBoy up, I only had about 5,000 people look at it," said artist Stafford Huyler. "But once it was advertised, I had 20,000 people look at it in four days."

Where it might take a budding artist years to land a syndication deal that would result in newspaper placement, it takes only a few hours to draw a strip and post it to the Internet, which has a potential audience of 25 million.

Net.toons are usually found on the World Wide Web feature of the Internet, a vast network of electronic documents located in computers all over the world. Users can jump from one to the other by clicking on "links" that the documents' authors embed in them.

Those links can include full-color graphic images, and as a result the Web has inspired a revolution in publishing.

Using software designed to "browse" the World Wide Web - such as Mosaic, Cello or Lynx - those with connections to the Internet can find several net.toons. More are planned.

There are even some daily newspaper cartoons that have become popular net.toons, such as Scott Adams' Dilbert or Bob Thaves' Frank & Ernest.

Howard Rheingold, a cyberspace guru and author of Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, said the Web is an ideal place for cartoonists because of its nature.

"The Web is a visual medium." Rheingold said via electronic mail. "Toons don't take a year to download. Toons are serial - perfect for your daily fix of on-line addiction."

Rheingold also is editor of HotWired, a planned on-line version of Wired magazine, which covers the culture of cyberspace.

HotWired, scheduled to debut next month, will have its own comics, Rheingold said, which takes advantage of the unique nature of the World Wide Web.

Net.toonists who want to display their work must either have access to a computer that can display documents on the World Wide Web, or have an Internet access provider that will rent space on a machine.

The first cartoon posted exclusively to the World Wide Web was Dave Farley's Doctor Fun, a one-panel, full-color net.toon with a decidedly twisted outlook.

Farley, a 30-year-old computer technician for the library system at the University of Chicago, began drawing Doctor Fun a little over a year ago and posted his first installment on the Web last September.

A new Doctor Fun appears each weekday, which keeps Farley busy.

"My biggest overhead is time," Farley said. "I do the drawings

in batches, and it takes me about an evening to finish each color cartoon."

His topics range from science ("Recent excitement in the microbiology lab ended abruptly when Doctor Roscoe's `giant amoeba' turned out to be a fried egg.") to spoofs of pop culture ("Mighty Morphin Forest Rangers.") to outright weirdness ("Somewhere deep within the desolate Arctic wastelands, Superbooger returns to his Nostril of Solitude.").

While Farley's appeal is universal, Huyler's Netboy is aimed squarely at the denizens of the Internet.

"It's parody, of course," Huyler said. "The Internet needs a good parody."

Huyler, 23, is creative director for InterAccess, a Chicago-based Internet provider. NetBoy has been on the World Wide Web, based at InterAccess, since early summer and was an instant hit.

Drawn as a stick figure, NetBoy is an Internet innocent, Huyler said. His greatest joy in life is "fast .GIFs," or full-color pictures that can be downloaded off the Internet.

"People who think of themselves as computer people, as geeks or nerds, see the humor within themselves," Huyler said. "Each of the characters in NetBoy are people you will find on the Internet."

In two recent installments, NetBoy accidentally crashes the Internet. The "geeks" who lived to surf the 'Net actually come out of their homes and interact with others.

The result is a cure for cancer ("I took my Doom (a computer game) skills and applied them toward medicine"), reduction of the national debt and "a yummy fudge that gives you a positive mental attitude, no aftereffects, nonfattening and tastes great . . . for pennies."

Both Huyler and Farley post their net.toons for free, but are considering ways to make money, such as selling items with the cartoons' images on them. Huyler, for example, is about to start selling NetBoy T-shirts.

Posting cartoons on the Internet raises copyright issues. It's easy to grab a copy of a work and store it on a computer. Huyler and Farley don't mind individuals doing that, they say, so long as they don't profit from use of the net.toons.

Scott Adams, author of the daily strip Dilbert, is syndicated to 200 newspapers through United Media. But the cartoon also appears on the Internet in several forms, both on the World Wide Web and in a Usenet newsgroup. Instead of posting for free, Adams has signed contracts with the sites.

The cartoon also appears on America Online, which has exclusive rights to Dilbert for commercial on-line services.

At first, Adams said, he was concerned about theft of his work.

"As is true with most things in life, the thing you worry about the most turns out to be the least problem," he said. "What's happened is that its presence on the 'Net has increased interest in people buying it in the newspaper."

Dilbert, which does not appear in a Houston daily newspaper, focuses on humor in the workplace. Adams puts his electronic mail address on his newspaper strips, and gets 50 messages a day, many of them ideas that turn into strips.

"There are several advantages," Adams said. "As a cartoonist, you never get to see your customer. But no real business can survive that way, and it's the biggest thing that needs fixing in cartooning. I knew technologically how to fix it." .......................

Toons on the Internet

There are a handful of regular cartoons that appear on the World Wide Web feature of the Internet. To see them, you'll need a direct or SLIP connection, to the Internet and a graphical Web browser, such as Mosaic or Cello..